Residual stress engineering in welding becomes more and more prominent as the use of tailored materials, e.g., high-strength steels, calls for maximum utilization of the material properties. As a consequence, residual stresses have to be considered as design criterion. Moreover, it may be utilized to improve the material's performance. Low transformation temperature alloys are a smart approach to control the residual stresses already during the welding process avoiding time-consuming postweld treatments. This paper gives an overview about the progress made in research in this topic with special focus on residual stresses. Basics as well as important developments will be addressed.
Low Transformation Temperature (LTT) alloys are high alloyed filler materials, which exhibit a martensitic phase transformation at comparatively low temperatures in order to prevent high tensile residual stresses. A number of publications have already shown that even compressive residual stresses can be observed when using LTT filler materials. Up to know it is not clear in which way this it applicable to multi-run welding exhibiting high shrinkage restraint and complex heat input. In this study the potential for stress reduction during welding of LTT alloys was studied by numerical simulation. This allows for evaluation of the stress development in every single weid run. Additionally, the impact of the structural stiffness was incorporated by modelling a special sample geometry exhibiting a high intensity of restraint. The results show that the stress formation in weid longitudinal direction is determined by the phase transformation as high compressive residual stresses were found here independent from the weid run. On the other hand the transformation induced stresses in weid transverse direction are superimposed by tensile stresses originated from shrinkage restraint. With increasing number of runs the tensile residual stress level is raised. The results were confirmed by residual stress measurements using diffraction methods.